Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Iowa and Beyond: For the Tea Party GOP "Common Sense" Racism is the Road to the White House

The 2012 Republican presidential field, a hydra which self-destructively feeds on itself, had one more battle royale in Iowa. Fighting to a standstill, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul bloodied each other. While the Tea Party GOP is still a house divided, their leading candidates share a common, uniting, go to issue: hating on the blacks makes for good politics; it pays substantial political dividends.

Decades after the founding of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the old school remains the true school. Ultimately for conservatives, demagoguing the negroes can still help stir up support among the white populist faithful.

Social scientists, historians, psychologists and others have developed an extensive vocabulary to talk about the lived politics of the color line. These terms include such notable phrases as symbolic racism, white racial resentment, the white racial frame, in-group and out-group anxiety, ethnocentrism, prejudice, realistic group conflict, colorblind racism, systems of structured inequality, racial formation, and front stage vs. backstage racism.

In thinking through the politics of race at work in the white conservative political imagination, this seemingly disparate terminology is connected by a common thread. Race and racial ideologies are ways of seeing the world, of locating people and individuals relative to one another, and are a cognitive map for making sense of social relationships. While shocking to outsiders, the type of racism played with so casually by Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, Paul and other conservatives is a type of "common sense" for their public.

Likewise, those who embrace Gingrich's habit of stereotyping "inner city blacks" as lazy, unmotivated, and criminal, probably identify as "compassionate conservatives," or "good Christians." There is no intended malice on their part. To them, "everyone knows" that these observations about black and brown people are "true."

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
"And provide for themselves and their families," Santorum added, to applause. "The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again."

"Right," responded one audience member, as another woman can be seen nodding.

There are several elements at work here.

First, poverty in America is racialized. The image in the public imagination is of black welfare queens, or illegal aliens birthing "anchor babies" who live off of the government tit, profiting from food stamps and the generosity of the American people. The white poor rarely, if ever, enter the picture. Second, black people are in a parasitic relationship with white Americans (Santorum's "someone" else). In sum, black people are "lazy," and a dependent class, unable to take care of their families except for the generosity and benevolence of white people.

The most powerful part of Santorum's appeal to his white audience in Iowa is the implication that black people are receiving some type of "reparations." For Santorum and the Tea Party GOP, blacks are plagued by "bad culture" and are existentially prone to poverty. Therefore, in a country where labor, capitalism, and citizenship are inexorably connected, blacks are outside of the political community.

In this imagination, it does not matter that whites are the majority of America's poor.

It does not matter that most people on public assistance and welfare in Iowa are white.

It does not matter that there is a deep history which explains how conservatives have spun a fiction about black and brown poverty while ignoring structural economic inequality, and how many of the policies endorsed by the Tea Party GOP in the name of economic austerity and punishing people of color (who are coded as "the poor" or "unproductive citizens"), also disproportionately harm the white working and middle classes.

This local type of common sense helps to explain the feelings of defense, denial, and injury that many white conservatives exhibit when challenged about the racism of the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing establishment. While the leadership and media elites from which they take their cues skillfully play the race baiting game, rank and file Fox News conservatives simply feel aggrieved at the suggestion that anyone would take their common sense understandings of the world to be racist, bigoted, or based on false understandings about the nature of racism and white privilege in the Age of Obama.

In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of nativism, an authoritarian-like embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other, are so central to contemporary white populist conservatism, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.

Moreover, politics is essentially about the creation of an imagined community. The stump speeches about evil liberals who hate America, the cheering of dying cancer patients who lack insurance, the booing of gay soldiers, and the numerous fictions about the economy, science, the Constitution, and public policy more generally are taken as divine gospel. These fictions are standing priors for contemporary conservatives which help to mark out the boundaries of their political world.

During an election year, and as a function of a highly polarized 24 hour news environment, it is a given that the incumbent president will be the target of vicious attacks by the out party. By implication, the election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, has amplified all of these tensions. The election of a member of the racial out-group has made the stakes especially high for white conservatism. Obama is anathema to the Tea Party GOP soul, the living embodiment of a world turned upside down, for no man who looks like him could ever be leader of the free world, where whiteness is inseparable from being "American."

By implication, there is a short line from the white racial appeals of Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Romney and others directly to President Obama. He has been called "the food stamp president" and a "ghetto crackhead." Obama is stained by the Birthers who say he is not an American citizen. The appeals to American exceptionalism are naked arguments that a black man like Obama cannot help but be outside of the "normal" political culture of this country. It has also been implied that President Obama is a perpetual "they," a member of a marginalized group who by association is lazy, anti-white, unqualified, and an "affirmative action baby" that somehow managed to steal a presidential election and win the popular vote.

Many may laugh at such a formulation. However, the Tea Party GOP, Iowa voters, and others who clamor to participate in the Republican primaries, would take such claims as common sense knowledge. For people of color, the outsider, the Other, and those who are not (in their eyes) "quintessentially American" (and thus have to prove their authenticity to the white conservative gaze), this is not your country.

You people may have built and improved this country, but it is not yours. For the Tea Party GOP and the populist conservatism of the present moment, you people are just guests. They will remind you people of that fact at every moment.

Without my johnson to hang onto, jiggaboos wouldn't have a dayyum thing to talk about.

In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of 2nd/3rd line inheritors of the civil rights movement depend upon an imaginary embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other. These imaginary grievances are so central to contemporary racism chasing, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.

Moreover, politics is essentially about the creation of an imagined community.

Jiggaboos want to be in this world of predatory militarism and materialism, and yet cannot and will not hold up their end of the bargain. The old pudding man may have been right about y'all as far as he took it a few years back, problem is, he didn't go far enough. It's not just the ghetto troglodytes making you "respectable kneegrows" look bad, it's you 2nd/3rd line inheritors playing make believe and making hella excuses who've let down the poor and disenfranchised ghetto trog with your sheer and unequivocal incompetence over the past 40 years. Given three generations in which to to "run things", you ran them straight into the ground - because you are technically, operationally, and managerially incompetent.

@Cnu. Thanks. Very thorough. You forgot a big piece of the puzzle in your broad indictment of educational mismanagement.

What is the role of the State? How do you account for diminished budgets? How does political context and the starving of central cities account for your mismanagement model?

You can have all of the skills, abilities, and vision. With no money you ain't gonna get nothing done.

You are mostly right and I am in agreement with you on many things; I also think you have some real insight into what the world will look like going forward.

Where I disagree is on your inability to paint a full picture of the causal variables responsible for the situation which you lament, and how they may (or not) make the story a bit more complex than the one you offer.

Another popular misconception is that per-pupil spending is very low in urban school districts with poor residents. As a statement of fact, this is just not generally true: for the 50 school districts in the United States that best fit this characterization, the ratio of the school district’s per-pupil spending to its state’s median spending averages more than one. If central city school districts were to spend (per pupil) what typical school districts spend, they would spend less on average. This is so partly because urban school districts with poor residents have commercial property that generates revenue but no additional students, and also because most of the state and federal modifications to local school finance in the past 25 years have had the effect of increasing spending in districts with poor residents.

The most important trend in the problems facing school finance is that most states have experienced fast growth in per-pupil spending but rather stagnant student achievement for the last 25 years (Hanushek and Rivkin, 1994). This disjunction between spending and student achievement is the reason that so much interest is focused on explaining why the same school quality might cost more or less under different systems of school finance. The current ‘‘predicament’’ of school finance is a failure of productivity rather than a failure of spending—for most states.

For all of hypergraphic rigamarole and needlessly wasted ritual verbiage, Constructive Feedback the Cultural Strategist is dead on target in his indictment of 2nd and 3rd line inheritors who've had 3 generations to lead and get things accomplished, and have simply failed to execute politically, entrepreneurially, educationally, morally and culturally on behalf of the constituents they purport to serve.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, The Lost Angeles Blade as well as online magazines and publications such as Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.